Taste of Ink | j.jk & k.th (COMPLETED)

Take a Hit for the Team

Jungkook saw Namjoon walking the area like he did most days and he stayed seated on the low brick wall rather than move. Right now he felt like he could sit here for hours and hours and not move, for there was a terrible weight on his chest that he couldn't possibly budge. He felt sick and he thought about how Yoongi had joked about him getting sick from the dirt in their apartment room but he had ended up getting ill from something else. Officer Kim walked with a confidence that was completely at odds with how he currently felt and he watched him patrolling the opposite road across the wide stretch of road. His skateboard was hugged against his chest, legs stretched out in front of him to take up quite an amount of the street. A few passing people had looked at him almost as if they thought he should move his legs and not obstruct the sidewalk but he didn't. He didn't even look at them because his eyes were glued to the park gates.

Jungkook hadn't been given a job this morning because the entire den was still recovering from the chaos of the previous day and he had woken up to find that the building was suffocating to be stuck inside. Everyone had been sitting around in the storefront working away without the usual sound of laughter, no alcohol scent hanging in the air but enough cigarette smoke to nearly choke him when he had stepped into the room. It had been clear that everyone was still struggling to fix the problems that the single brawl had caused and Jungkook had rapidly discovered that he didn't want to stay in the building for longer than a moment. So he had went to Sunmi and had asked who he was running for only to have been told that the dealers were a little busy for the day sorting out personal connections and that she would get back to him in the evening if there was a change. She had looked rather haggard after yesterday and he had not been surprised by this. The poor woman had had to fix up not only Jaebum's sorry ass but also a few other goons that had managed to make it back to the den before the police had showed and hauled their asses out of there. She had given stitches to split eyebrows and lips, had set broken noses and fingers with little pieces of plastic and layers and layers of bandage, and she had also been juggling phone calls and meetings whilst she had been doing so; telephone in the usual position in the crook between her neck and shoulder as she had barked things down it and had worked on the battered men's faces. She had coped surprisingly well with the situation and he was not surprised for she had fixed up quite a few of the goons in the past when their injuries didn't require hospitalisation.

After finding out that he had had no drops to make he had located Jaebum in one of the apartment rooms where he was currently resting for a foreseeable week or two until his bruised and aching ribs allowed him to get back into action. Jungkook had found it so very strange looking down at the man and seeing him lying on a bed rather than on his feet working. Jaebum wasn't the type to lie around in the daylight hours, yet he had no choice because he had taken enough hard blows to his ribs to crack at least one of them. In the past the man had always came back from brawls with the occasional markings on his skin: a graze from someone's ring splitting his cheek open, a closed-over eye that would go black by the next morning, a chipped tooth that would quickly be replaced by whoever had hired him. He did not end up lying in bed having other men running around for him because he couldn't move at all. Yet despite this fact the man had spoken to him about what had happened yesterday in more detail than the shouting goons and dealers had wanted to know when he had arrived.

Jungkook had asked him about Yoongi and had been told that his friend was very much still working away but the other man didn't have a clue where. All Jaebum knew was that he wasn't in the building with him when the place had been stormed and people had had the shit kicked out of them so that was a good sign. It didn't greatly lessen his panic but it made him feel a little better about it. Everyone had found out from connections that Hong really had died as a result of the blow to the head that he had sustained. According to the dealer they had a nurse working in the local hospital, and the woman had reported that his body had been brought in with two critically injured men. Hong had went straight into the morgue: massive cranial damage that had caused hemorrhaging from several blood vessels. Not a pleasant way to go at all but he was pretty certain that Hong had been knocked clean out the minute the bat had cracked down on his skull. They had one dead man and two in the emergency room with life-threatening injuries. The dealer he knew by the surname Jang and he had slipped into a coma from his own injury and a goon he had seen enough times around the den called Yesung had punctured a lung several times and suffered severe concussion and a fractured orbital lobe. Jaebum it seemed, along with the other goons, had gotten off very well even with his busted ribs and split lips.